What Hath God Wrought (4 page)

With the battle over, Jackson ignored his promise to secure equal rewards for the black men who had stood with him at the barricade. Besides twenty-four dollars cash, each soldier was supposed to receive 160 acres of public land, but forty years later, the black veterans were still trying to get their land claims honored. The slaves among them had been returned to their owners, who were not bound by any promises made.
¹⁵
On the other hand, Jackson showed solicitude for those masters whose slaves had escaped and taken refuge with the enemy. He repeatedly demanded that the departing British army return them. General Lambert, to his credit, refused and took some two hundred self-emancipated people off to lives of poverty but freedom in Bermuda.
¹⁶

If history were a novel, this episode would end with the dramatic repulse of the invaders on January 8. In real life the British did not abandon their campaign against New Orleans. The day after the great land battle, their fleet sailed up the Mississippi and bombarded Fort St. Philip at Plaquemine for the next nine days, hoping to force a passage, but to no avail. General Lambert’s army, having rejoined its ships and recovered its resolve, sailed off to Mobile Bay and there resumed the offensive. After taking Mobile they would be able to march westward to the Mississippi and cut off New Orleans from the north. On February 11, Fort Bowyer, guarding Mobile Bay, surrendered to the British. The city of Mobile would surely have fallen, but the next day news finally arrived that a peace treaty had been signed on December 24. In the language of boxing, Mobile was saved by the bell.

Six months after the Battle of New Orleans, the Irishmen of the 44th Regiment redeemed their military reputation at Waterloo. But Thomas Mullins was court-martialed and cashiered.
¹⁷

II

What did the American victory really mean? The Battle of New Orleans had been fought after the treaty of peace had been signed. Technically, the war ended only with the exchange of treaty ratifications, but in fact the armies ceased hostilities as soon as they learned of the treaty itself. Had news of the treaty arrived soon enough, the battle would not have been fought. The bloodshed at the Battle of New Orleans was a particularly tragic result of the slowness of communication at the start of the nineteenth century. In fact, the slow pace at which news crossed the Atlantic had been responsible for the war in the first place: When Congress declared war on Great Britain, June 18, 1812, its members did not know that two days earlier Foreign Secretary Castlereagh had announced in Parliament that the Orders in Council restricting American commerce would be suspended.
¹⁸

In an effort to endow the Battle of New Orleans with strategic significance, Jackson’s admirers later claimed that if the British had won the engagement, they might have revoked the Treaty of Ghent by declining to exchange ratifications and seeking a more advantageous settlement.
¹⁹
In fact, no such meaning can be derived from the bloodshed of January 8. The prince regent ratified the treaty as soon as he received it and dispatched the ratification to Washington without waiting to hear the outcome of the campaign in the Gulf of Mexico. Far from planning any alteration in ratifying the treaty, Prime Minister Liverpool worried that the other side might “play us some trick in the ratification of it.”
²⁰
Hence the quick British ratification. A more plausible possibility is that if the British had captured either Mobile or New Orleans, they might have turned the places over to the Spanish. Neither Britain nor Spain recognized the legality of the Louisiana Purchase, since France had violated the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800) by selling Louisiana to the United States. The American occupation of the city and environs of Mobile rested on nothing more legitimate than a military seizure from the Spanish in 1813, so the British would have been legally justified in returning them to the Spanish governor at Pensacola. Yet there is no direct evidence the British had such an intention, and they did not deliver Fort Bowyer on Mobile Bay to the Spanish at the conclusion of hostilities. Instead, the evidence suggests that the British were principally motivated to capture New Orleans by the prospect of plunder, and that their occupation of the city, if it had been achieved, would have been short.
²¹

Americans at the time did not see their great victory as meaningless. What they chose to make of it is instructive. They did not emphasize the fact that the battle had been fought after peace had been agreed. They seldom rejoiced in the multiracial, multiethnic nature of the winning army. Neither did they celebrate the technological know-how that enabled their artillery to perform so well. Instead the public seized upon the notion that western riflemen, untrained but sharp-eyed, had defeated the arrogant British. In fact, primary responsibility for the American victory lay with the artillery, not with the frontier marksmen of legend. It was the cannons that wrought most of the slaughter on the Chalmette plantation. A single noteworthy discharge from a thirty-two-pound naval gun crammed with musket balls “served to sweep the centre of the attacking force into eternity,” in the words of a British officer.
²²
The infantrymen in the center of Jackson’s line were under strict orders to hold their fire. Those in his army who got to use their weapons were typically armed not with rifles but with muskets or hunting pieces firing buckshot. The fog and smoke severely limited opportunities for sharpshooting. In any case, the best marksmen were not necessarily frontiersmen: A target contest between Coffee’s Tennessee Volunteers and Beale’s Rifle Company, composed of middle-class New Orleans citizenry, was won by the latter.
²³

The excellent gunnery that served the American cause so well at New Orleans paralleled the excellent gunnery that stood the U.S. Navy in good stead whenever the outnumbered American ships got the chance to fight the Royal Navy on equal terms. The contrast between the effectiveness of the artillery and the navy with the repeatedly disgraceful performances of the militia in the War of 1812 could scarcely be more glaring. But cannons seemed not altogether satisfactory as a patriotic symbol for the American public. Cannons were products of the industrial revolution and government-sponsored technological development. A predominantly rural people wanted heroes from the countryside. Surely it must be “the
American Husbandman
, fresh from his plough,” a congressional orator insisted, who had bested the best Europe had to offer.
²⁴

A popular song of the 1820s, “The Hunters of Kentucky,” extolled the performance of the Kentucky militia at New Orleans despite the fact that Jackson himself had criticized the Kentuckians harshly and never retracted his condemnation. Exploited for political purposes, the song perpetuated the misperception of what had happened.
²⁵
The Battle of New Orleans came to be regarded by Jackson’s many admirers as a victory of self-reliant individualists under charismatic leadership. It seemed a triumph of citizen-soldiers over professionals, of the common man over hierarchy, of willpower over rules.

The reluctance to credit the artillery with the victory partly reflected a reluctance to credit the professional servicemen, ethnic-minority city-dwellers, and pirates who manned the guns rather than the all-American frontiersmen. It also manifested a failure to foresee how much the future of the United States would owe to mechanization and government-sponsored enterprises like the federal armories that made cannons. Jackson’s admirers liked to believe theirs was a country where untutored vigor could prevail; to point out that technical expertise mattered seemed undemocratic. Their interpretation of the battle was compatible with Jefferson’s vision of “an empire for liberty” stretching to the west, a belief that the nation’s destiny lay in the multiplication of family farms and the extension of American power across continental space.

Americans agreed in rejecting the traditional class privilege exemplified by the British army and Europe in general. The Battle of New Orleans symbolized America’s deliverance from all that. The past had been defeated. But where did America’s future lie? With the individualistic, expansionist values exemplified by frontier marksmen? Or with the industrial-technological values exemplified by the artillery? Which would better serve American security and prosperity: the extension of agriculture across the continent or the intensive improvement and diversification of the economy and its infrastructure? To those great questions the rival political parties of the coming decades, Democrats and Whigs, offered sharply divergent answers.

In the thirty-three years following the Battle of New Orleans, the United States would extend its imperial reach across a continent vast, diverse, and already inhabited. The history of the United States can be understood only in relation to the continental setting within which it unfolded. The human geography of North America in 1815 included peoples of several races, many languages, and sometimes incompatible aspirations. Innumerable tribes of Native Americans maintained de facto independence of three great mainland empires: the United States, Mexico, and British North America. The imposition of U.S. authority all the way to the Pacific, so clear by 1848, represented an astounding transformation when one considers the state of North America in 1815.

Within the United States, the overwhelming majority of the population in 1815 engaged in agriculture. The largest number were family farmers, who lived lives of hardship and toil, conditioned by earnest hopes for a better standard of living. Their agricultural practices husbanded scarce resources and squandered those, like land, that they found plentiful. Sometimes their ambitions included taking the lands of others. A distinctive group of Americans consisted of those enslaved; among the harsh realities of their lives, they nursed aspirations of their own. The United States in 1815 was still an open-ended experiment, mostly potential rather than actuality. Amidst a continent of unrealized possibilities, the various peoples of North America pursued diverging visions of the future.

I

In 1815, as today, the largest metropolis on the North American continent was Mexico City. At that time it held about 150,000 people—almost as many as the two largest cities in the United States (New York and Philadelphia) put together.
¹
Beginning in 1521, the Spanish had built it on top of the even more populous Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325. The Catholic cathedral, constructed on the site of the Aztec temple by the central plaza now called the Zócalo, had just been renovated in 1813. “This city is truly a magnificent one,” marveled Stephen Austin when he arrived in 1822.
²
La ciudad de México
boasted botanical gardens, an art academy, the world’s best mining college, and a distinguished university. Remarkably for cities at the time, it had wide streets lighted at night, paved sidewalks, and a system of public transportation.
³
The newly independent Mexican nation that Stephen Austin visited stretched from Panama to Oregon, occupied an area approximately equal to that of the United States, and included about two-thirds as many people. Yet in 1847, this proud capital city would stand conquered, occupied like a fallen Rome and (as a Mexican government committee warned in 1821 might happen) stripped of half its vast domain by barbarians from the north.
⁴
After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States would rank far larger than Mexico in both area and population. Through waging war, the United States wrought a momentous transformation in international power.

In 1815, Mexican independence lay six years in the future, and the chief executive occupying the Palacio Nacional was still the viceroy of New Spain. The mother country had recently granted a written constitution, and Mexico sent representatives to the Spanish Cortes (parliament). Fighting for Mexican independence had begun five years earlier, but for the time being Spanish officials seemed to have overcome the rebels and felt confident that royal authority would prevail. Overt disloyalty actually constituted less of a problem to central control than the difficulties of communication and transportation. Lack of roads and restrictive imperial regulations intended to monopolize trade for the benefit of the home country had hindered Mexico’s economic development, and strong traditions of regional autonomy prevailed. The newspaper press flourished in the capital, but people who lived in other cities experienced remarkable isolation. A small creole elite of European descent dominated the country; a
mestizo
(mixed-race) middle class supplied its energy; but the Native American peasantry, even within the national heartland, mostly remained outside the mainstream of national life. Throughout their villages, and across the open spaces of the northern borderlands, people had little awareness of the larger world. In some remote areas, especially the far north and south, Indian tribes remained virtually independent of Spanish law, language, and culture, at times indeed waging war against them. Mexico City’s lack of effective communication with and control over the vast northern territories would make it difficult to protect them against the ambitions of an expansionist United States.
⁵

The most distant of all New Spain’s far-flung lands was Alta (Upper) California. In 1815, its northern boundary remained undefined. Spain claimed the coast all the way to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but British, Russian, and American merchants and explorers had been active in that vicinity for a generation.
⁶
In 1812, the Russians had established a fur-trading post at Fort Ross on Bodega Bay. From San Diego to San Rafael above San Francisco Bay, the Spanish maintained their authority through a system of military bases (
presidios
) and missions operated by the Franciscan order of friars. Each mission community strove for substantial economic self-sufficiency through a mixture of agriculture and artisan manufacturing. The missions had been located, with the orderliness of absolutism, so that each lay a day’s journey away from the next one along the royal highway (
el camino real
).

The California missions provoked controversy, in their own time as well as in ours. The Franciscans intended to Christianize the local Indians and teach them useful skills. If the Natives adopted Western civilization they could become
gente de razón
(“rational people”) and taxpayers. Critics in Mexico and Spain claimed that the friars exploited their charges. Worst of all, contemporaries correctly observed, the missions incubated illness, by concentrating vulnerable populations in places where they became exposed to unfamiliar diseases. Between 1769, when Hispanic settlement began, and the end of Spanish rule in 1821, the Indian population of Alta California declined from approximately 300,000 to approximately 200,000.
⁷

The disease problem in the California mission communities was all too characteristic of encounters between European and Native American peoples. A population lacking any acquired immunity, either inherited or individual, to unfamiliar diseases can suffer rapid fatalities of catastrophic proportion during what is called a “virgin-soil” epidemic of infectious disease. Europeans themselves suffered virgin-soil epidemics of bubonic plague from Asia in the fourteenth century and of syphilis following the return of Columbus’s men. The ravages suffered by the inhabitants of the New World from unfamiliar European contagious diseases—including smallpox, measles, and influenza—were compounded by the disruptions of warfare and losses of food-producing land to the intruders. The resulting mortality, considered collectively, constituted one of the most gigantic calamities ever to befall the human race. Population estimates for the Americas on the eve of European contact vary widely, but even the most conservative ones indicate horrific death rates soon thereafter. Within central Mexico, population had bottomed out a hundred years or so after the Spanish conquest and slowly began to rebound, though at about 6 million in 1815 it remained far below the estimated numbers for the subjects of the Aztec Empire, notwithstanding immigration from the Old World.
⁸

In the United States, the Constitution exempted “Indians not taxed” from the census. In 1820, however, the federal government engaged Jedidiah Morse, a noted scholar, to undertake a comprehensive examination of the Indian tribes within the United States. Morse’s book-length report estimated the Indian population at 472,000, most of them living west of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase or in the Oregon Territory under joint U.S.-British authority. The original inhabitants of California, Texas, and the other Mexican lands that would be annexed by 1848 probably numbered a third to a half of a million. These figures do not include people of mixed ancestry living with white or black Americans and undifferentiated from them. But they certainly represented a dramatic decline from the Amerindian population of the same area c. 1600, which most scholars currently estimate at around 5 million, perhaps even 10 million.
⁹
Dispersed, nomadic peoples suffered less from contagion than concentrated village-dwellers like the Mandans, whom recurrent smallpox epidemics reduced from 9,000 c. 1750 to 150 in 1837. Many white contemporaries, even if compassionate, agreed with Alexis de Tocqueville that the Indians were “doomed” to die out entirely.
¹⁰

Because of the transatlantic slave trade, Africa too contributed diseases to the deadly mixture. Malaria and yellow fever, transmitted between human hosts by mosquitoes, came to the Western Hemisphere on the slave ships. Yellow fever, widespread in the Caribbean, periodically visited as far north as Philadelphia. In the early nineteenth century, malaria spread from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to become endemic throughout the vast Mississippi basin. In the case of these diseases, white people had no more immunity than Native Americans; malaria had killed a high proportion of early English colonists in Virginia, and the “ague,” as they called it, remained a curse for many settlers in the swampy lands or river bottoms of the Midwest.
¹¹

The oldest, most populous, and most economically developed of the Spanish borderlands was New Mexico. There Santa Fe and Taos became important commercial hubs, linked with El Paso and Chihuahua by New Mexico’s own
camino real
. Yet relations with the local Indian nations had remained problematic ever since the great Pueblo uprising in 1680. The prolonged war for Mexican independence that began in 1810 prompted the Spanish government to withdraw the troops protecting the province against Apache and Navajo raiders to more critical duties elsewhere, and for self-defense the
nuevomexicanos
contracted their settlements.
¹²
They remained a potential market for U.S. traders whenever the Spanish mercantile rules could be lifted.

Between the Rio Grande (then usually called the Rio Bravo) and the Nueces River countless cattle grazed. The Mexicans were the first cowboys, called
vaqueros
; they invented the horned saddle and the technique of roping from horseback. The cattle they rounded up for branding in the Nueces strip were longhorns, tough beasts descended from animals brought from Spain, some of which had gone wild and adapted to the dry environment. In 1846, this would constitute the “disputed area” between the United States and Mexico and witness the outbreak of the Mexican–American War. The Mexican
rancheros
would lose their lands and herds, but their successors would retain their occupational terminology: “corral,” “remuda,” “rodeo,” “sombrero,” “pinto,” “chaps” (
chaparajos
), “mustang” (
mesteño
), “lariat” (
la reata
).
¹³

Northeast of the Nueces stretched Texas, or Tejas. Nominally an outpost of New Spain in 1815, this had long been a borderland where Spanish, French, British, and American traders, soldiers, and settlers rotated a kaleidoscope of alliances, trade agreements, and wars with each other and the Kiowa, Comanche, Wichita, Jumano, Caddo, Apache, and more. Europeans call such a border region with no functioning sovereign power a “marchland”; American historians term it a “middle ground.”
¹⁴
Like the whites, some of the Indian tribes had only recently pushed their way into the Texas region. In a strategic borderland, Native peoples enjoyed their ability to play off the competing European powers against one another; conversely, however, whites played off Indian tribes against each other too. Warfare and trade among these diverse peoples coexisted in parallel; a group could buy weapons from one party to make war on another, or steal horses from one to sell to another. In Texas, as in New Mexico and elsewhere in North America, captives taken in war could be turned into trade goods by being held for ransom or sold as slaves; alternatively they might be tortured and killed, adopted, or even married.
¹⁵

Adding fuel to the fierce intergroup rivalries in Texas and the southern Plains was the introduction of the horse, a Spanish contribution even more important than cattle. Like the longhorns, some of these horses had escaped and turned feral, only to be redomesticated by Native Americans. More commonly, however, horses diffused north from Mexico by being stolen or sold from one human owner to another. During the eighteenth century, horses revolutionized hunting and warfare on the Great Plains, as they had done on the steppes of Central Asia five thousand years earlier. The nomadic way of life quickly adopted by the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Sioux, so famous and heroic, would have been impossible without their skillful exploitation of the possibilities created by horses. Other tribes, like the Pawnee, retained permanent villages and used hunting with horses to supplement their agriculture. But the horse shifted the military balance in favor of nomads and against villagers. Horses served as an end as well as a means of warfare, since most battles between tribes originated in raids to capture another’s horses. In an economic sense, many of the nomads became primarily pastoral people, that is, herders of their horses, and only intermittently buffalo hunters.
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